Luckily, you can use Android in a manner that reduces the data shared with Google and improves your privacy. The tips below share how.  

Uninstall unused apps

Regularly inspect your phone for apps you’ve not used in the recent past. Aside from draining your phone’s resources, they open doors to sensitive information. Long press on the app you haven’t used in a while and choose ‘Uninstall.’ If this option isn’t available, choose ‘App info’ and then ‘uninstall.’ 

For preinstalled apps, uninstalling may not be an option. In this case, disabling the apps is the best option. This won’t remove the app from your device, but it’ll prevent it from actively accessing information.

Be mindful of app permissions

Because we live in a data-driven world, most apps you install request access for specific conditions. Though some apps need these permissions to work, some don’t. An app that requests for access to data that’s not pertinent to its function is a warning sign. For instance, if a calculator requests access to your location and contact list, avoid it or deny the request. 

Moreover, pay attention to the performance of your phone after downloading an app. Drastic changes in performance, including the battery draining fast, could be a sign malicious apps are running in the background. 

To disable app permissions, navigate to Settings, then Apps. While here, choose the app to work on by clicking Permissions. You can choose to turn off permissions like your camera, microphone, and contacts. 

Keep the device’s software up-to-date

Updating your device’s software is crucial to safeguarding your data and privacy. Hacking methods are constantly evolving, so you need to use equally evolved security technologies. Consider the software updates like a vaccination for your device. 

You can manually update your software by navigating to to Settings > About Phone > System Update.  However, experts recommend setting your device to update automatically. This way, your phone is updated once a new software version is available. 

Smartphone Settings

Skim through your device’s settings to ensure settings like location tracking, microphone, and the camera is off for your device and individual apps. Bear in mind that disabling certain services for some apps may cripple the apps.  

Avoid Open Wi-Fi Networks

The mention of open Wi-Fi brings joy to mobile device users looking for free internet access. At the same time, IT and security professionals shake their heads and groan in despair as they imagine the potential damage. 

Public Wi-Fi in itself isn’t dangerous. It only becomes dangerous when it’s unsecured and allows unencrypted movement of data. Wi-Fi hotspots are secure if they have passwords and conform to WPA standards.  

Hackers can eavesdrop on the connection when you are connected to an open Wi-Fi network and gather useful data from your online activities. With the correct equipment, they can intercept unencrypted data. Moreover, cybercriminals can distribute malicious software like viruses and malware. 

Alternatively, you can use VPN to prevent hackers from snooping. 

Don’t share location with apps

Most apps request you share your location. For some applications like Uber and Google Maps, this is useful. In fact, without the information, some apps may lose some or all functionality.

On the flip side, many apps don’t need your location data. This is a major security concern of using the 5G network and why Huawei is banned from using it. Some people feared Huawei was gathering location data from their users despite taking precautions against it. 

Navigate to Settings > Apps > App Settings > App Settings> App permissions and Location to turn off app location permissions.

Alternatively, you can disable Google’s location history and keep Google from knowing your whereabouts. To do this, navigate to Settings, then Location, and Google Location History.  

Key Takeaway

Smartphones come with many security risks that continue to grow. As such, it’s important to implement the above measures. Other measures that can help protect your privacy include:

• Using a VPN
• Avoid clicking on suspicious links
• Only install apps from Apple and Google stores

Gay Homenick

The post How to Protect Your Privacy on Apps appeared first on Napalm Automation.

OpenAI explained that the API can be “programmed,” showing only a few examples of finished work. The software also allows performance to be tuned for specific tasks by training on the data sets provided.

The API gives access to models on GPT-3 with improved speed and throughput.

As the company stressed, OpenAI cannot foresee all the possible consequences of using the technology, which is why it was decided to open the API.

“We hope that the API will significantly lower the barrier to producing useful AI-based products, resulting in tools and services that are difficult to imagine today,” the company said.

Anyone interested in gaining access to the beta can join the likes of Algolia, Quizlet and Reddit, as well as the Middlebury Institute for International Studies. They have been given access to the API by invitation. Over time, the practice plans to expand, and subsequently the software will become publicly available.

The API has been the product of years of research and processing of the largest text databases. As noted by Eli Chen, CEO of the startup Veriph.ai, who has tried an earlier version of the product, there is a sense that the API has combined “all human knowledge.”

Greg Brockman, co-founder and chief technology officer of OpenAI, sees the new product as a major advance in artificial intelligence, the first step toward incorporating AI into virtually every piece of software. He promises that OpenAI will be careful in its handling of the technology so that it doesn’t do “harm.” “It’s hard to anticipate everything that could happen,” Brockman noted. However, he said, it’s better to test the technology now, while it’s easily controllable, and learn the necessary lessons.

In late May, OpenAI showed off its new GPT-3 algorithm, designed for texting based on just a few examples. Its architecture is similar to GPT-2, but the model was trained on 175 billion parameters or 570 gigabytes of text. GPT-3 can answer questions on the text it reads, as well as write poems, solve anagrams, and do translations. It only needs 10 to 100 examples to learn.

Gay Homenick

The post OpenAI unveiled its first commercial product, an API for accessing AI models appeared first on Napalm Automation.

Speech recognition works for 80 languages. It is possible to recognize speech live through a microphone or audio from files (probably up to 2 minutes). Multiple formats are supported, including FLAC, AMR and PCMU.

It is now possible to embed, for example, voice control for any program via the Cloud Speech API. The system outputs recognized text instantly in the process.

Google says that the Speech API is accurate enough to work even with noisy backgrounds, so the material doesn’t need to be pre-cleaned by processing with filters or using expensive noise-canceling equipment and microphones.

Automatic filtering of unwanted content is supported for some languages.

Rumors about the opening of the interfaces have been circulating for the past few weeks. Experts expressed the opinion that Google is going to enter the market, where now works Nuance and some other companies specializing in speech recognition. Now it will be hard for them to compete with Google, its system uses the latest developments in self-learning neural networks, the same engine used in Google’s voice search and voice typing from Google’s keyboard. With each passing month, the Cloud Speech API will recognize text more and more accurately.

The company announced the news about the Cloud Speech API yesterday at the NEXT conference. In addition to speech recognition, developers now have access to the Cloud Machine Learning platform.

The opening of Google API for speech recognition will hit not only the specialized companies, but also Apple, whose Siri voice assistant is significantly inferior to Google’s neural network in terms of recognition accuracy and functionality.

Gay Homenick

The post Google opens speech recognition API in 80 languages appeared first on Napalm Automation.

The goal of the win32metadata project is a complete description of the Win32 API in metadata to facilitate interaction with the API, improve correctness and minimize maintenance costs. Microsoft has developed a Windows metadata file with a full description of the Win32 API, which is compatible with ECMA-335 (winmd) and published it on nuget.org.

The company explained that because of the volume of material in the Win32 API, it would take some time to accurately describe all of the elements.

To use the Win32 API in other programming languages, Microsoft has added language projections on top of them.

C# / Win32

This projection was created in partnership with Andrew Arnott, owner of P/Invoke for .NET. It parses metadata and creates the P/Invoke wrappers that are required for API calls. To install the projection, you need to:

• Add a link to Microsoft.Windows.SDK.Win32Metadata from nuget.org;
• Place the NativeMethods.txt file in the root directory of the project, along with the list of Win32 functions that are scheduled for the project.

Microsoft has clarified that this is an early prototype for interacting with dynamically generated Win32 API projections, which they plan to develop for other languages as well.

Rust

The language projection for Rust inherited interaction methods from C++/WinRT. It allows you to call any Windows API via code created on the fly from metadata. Microsoft’s developers claim it gives the illusion of working with regular Rust modules. The projection does not divide the API by technology but provides a generic way to call any module, regardless of the underlying technology.

Other languages

Representatives from Microsoft are working on an open source C++ projection update on GitHub. They said that the project is at an early stage of development and programmers are now collecting feedback from users.

The Win32 API is used to directly interact applications with the operating system, and it was created for the C language. The Windows API has a different calling convention than cdecl, and uses stdcall instead, which allows programming languages which can call these functions and operate on data types in Windows binaries to interface with the API.

Previously, developers had to manually create wrappers and bindings for Rust and C#, which led to bugs and scalability problems. Such inconveniences significantly increased development costs and the burden on programmers.

In the roadmap, Microsoft planned to publish a complete Win32 metadata package on nuget.org with version control for all Windows SDK releases by the end of 2021, release language projections for C#, C++ and Rust, and integrate .NET 5 into the C# projection

Gay Homenick

The post Microsoft has simplified access to Win32 API for Rust and C# languages appeared first on Napalm Automation.